Drawing Power is a lively collection of mass-market print advertising fromthe 1890s to the recent past, starring both cartoonists and cartoon characters.While critics debate whether comics are high art or low art, the fact is thatthe comic strip was born as a commercial medium and was nurtured by competition,commerce, and advertising. Drawing Power will focus on the commercial roots ofnewspaper strips; the cross-promotions of artists, their characters, and retailproducts; and of the superb artwork that cartoonists invested in their lucrativefreelance work in advertising. Drawing Power is cultural history, chronicling atime in popular culture when cartoonists were celebrities and their strips andcharacters competed with the movies for the attention of a mass audience. Thebook will examine cartoonists as public personalities, and their advertisingefforts from the first heartbeat of the comic strip as an art form. Here aresurprising and familiar examples of products, accounts, memorable ad campaigns,and examples of widely known catchphrases. o Dr Seuss' "Flit" cartoonsand his longtime career hyping motor oil o The best-looking comic strip adsever: Milton Caniff and Noel Sickles (under pen names!) depicting character'spersonal crises relieved by a coffee substitute o Little Orphan Annie'sfamous Ovaltine campaign (as seen in A Christmas Story.) o Peanuts shillingFalcons, Dagwood selling atomic energy, and virtually every super-herotrafficking in the mortal realm to shill every product imaginable.